Is Barack Obama a warrior president? Not in the British tradition, of
course, which gave us Winston Churchill, with his crazy cavalry
charge against Sudanese spears, or the more cerebral Harold
Macmillan, shot to pieces in World War I, lying in the blood and the
mud reading Aeschylus. Obama is a post-Vietnam president: He walks in
the footsteps of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who took different
paths away from the jungles of Southeast Asia but later sent
Americans into harm’s way in foreign wars. He is—if we are to believe
his campaign ads, his vice presi-dent, and a recent breathless
encomium in the New York Times—a commander in chief more in line
with “Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.” He is a “gutsy” guy, who
has “embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink.”

Politically, it’s common and fair for an American presi-dent seeking
reelection to accentuate his manly qualities. Most Democrats to the
right of the editors at Mother Jones—and that is still most Democrats—
don’t want to elect a wimp. Modern democracies understandably don’t
demand that their leaders come from military backgrounds, let alone
have shown valor in battle. So we use a different standard to assess
their martial toughness. President Obama, his minions, and his
admirers have loudly told us he stakes his claim on two
accomplishments: the raid to kill Osama bin Laden and the aggressive
use of drones against jihadists. So let’s look.

The last two presidents, in fact, have used Predators to kill our
enemies. For going after Muslim holy warriors in geographically
challenging regions of the Greater Middle East, remote-controlled
aircraft are militarily and politically safer and more economical
than sending in special-operations teams. Early on, the Bush
administration accelerated the development of drones because they
were an immediately useful part of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld’s technology-driven transformation of the armed forces.
Still, for the Bush administration to trumpet Predators as a sign of
the president’s warrior ethos would have seemed surreal, given his
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It also would have appeared
unseemly, when Rumsfeld’s high-tech doctrine fared poorly against
insurgencies that demanded more troops than the secretary had deemed
necessary.

In theory, killer drones are almost a liberal’s fighting dream-
machine: no dead Americans (unless they are the targets), no captured
U.S. soldiers, no wounded to transport home, no crashing helicopters,
a minimum of soul-tormenting reflection, no blood or gore on TV or in
print, and limited collateral damage. Perhaps best of all, because of
drones’ stealth, cooperating Muslim governments can deny their
complicity with the infidel superpower. True, some leftists have
risen to question the ethics of drone use (if terrorism should be
treated as a crime, which is sometimes the view of the Obama
administration, then killing folks without trial or judicial review,
remotely and clandestinely, is wrong). But most American liberals
have approved or kept their reservations quiet. Killing jihadists
overseas is apparently more moral than putting them alive into
Guantánamo Bay.

If we look down the road, Predators will likely be an essential part
of the foreign policy of any liberal president ambivalent about the
use of American power. Given President Obama’s near-total silence
about the impending sequestration of nearly $600 billion in military
spending because of a budget impasse (half the cuts will come from
defense, which accounts for less than one-quarter of the budget) on
top of the $800 billion already axed, the president obviously sees
spending on defense as less necessary to the nation’s health than
maintaining the entitlement status quo and implementing Obamacare.
Drones sustain the illusion that you can do more with less, that
jihadists and their organizations can be sufficiently neutralized
without contemplating more troops or aerial bombardments.

As Max Boot has pointed out, the president’s eager use of drones and
the raid on Abbottabad have actually allowed Obama’s inner dove to
come out. A strong preference for massive welfare-state spending
aside, slashing defense spending is one sure and lasting way to
militarily neuter the United States. Like many liberals under the age
of 60, President Obama has a problem with American hegemony—the idea
that American military power is essential and decisive in keeping
malevolent ideologies and states at bay. Where downing an aggressive
fascist dictator with a proven hunger for weapons of mass destruction
and long-standing relationships with terrorists seemed sensible to
senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden in 2003, a certain Illinois
state senator knew better. President Obama’s profound foreign-
policy “caution” is rooted in a common, if not sacrosanct, historical
understanding of post-Vietnam liberalism: that America is more likely
to do harm than good when it intervenes in the Third World.

With drone attacks and bin Laden’s death for backdrop, the president
seems to think—and he may be right—that he can disengage the United
States from the Greater Middle East without political risk.
Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities know that an American withdrawal
on the president’s schedule will unleash civil war that will likely
bring the Taliban and their many jihadist allies back to the gates of
Kabul. Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara are already envisioning the new
Afghan Army’s crackup into its component parts. In 1990 it was
impossible to argue in Washington that America should remain engaged
in Afghanistan (in the CIA, you could have counted on one hand the
folks who didn’t snore when Afghan-related intelligence crossed their
desks). Americans were tired of the Cold War. It’s a delicious irony
that many on the left who after 9/11 underscored George H.W. Bush’s
failure to pay attention to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union
retreated now 23 years later worry little about U.S. withdrawal.

On the left and right, Muslim-fatigue has set in. The conflict is too
costly in dollars and manpower, the viability of non-Taliban Afghan
power requires too much American support, and the American people,
our elected representatives plead in private, just want out,
consequences be damned. The Republican-controlled Congress has so far
approved the enormous reduction in military spending that will likely
create a downward spiral difficult to stop. Many Republican members
would rather not talk about the Muslim Middle East, just as our fore-
fathers once avoided talking about leprosy. Eleven years after 9/11,
George F. Will, once a peerless supporter of a strong military and
both Iraq wars, sees massive defense cuts as a good thing if they
limit “America’s ability to engage in troop-intensive nation-
building.” Muscular Wilsonian liberals and neoconservatism have
become as injurious to the nation’s health as socialized medicine.

In great part, the president, his Predators, and the raid on
Abbottabad loom large because Republicans have become so small. The
world that George W. Bush gave them they cannot handle. The second
Iraq war is probably the single greatest catalyst behind the Great
Arab Revolt. In much the way that former national security advisers
Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, twin beacons of
American “realism,” predicted, the war shocked the region. What had
been seen as immovable autocracies became fragile regimes fearful and
contemptuous of all the talk of democracy that poured forth from
Westernized Arab expatriates, disenchanted youth, and Islamists. The
Iraq war provocatively and irrepressibly introduced the discussion of
popular government into the region: “democracy through the barrel of
a gun,” as antiwar Westerners and Arabs put it. For those Westerners
who had eyes to see, knew Arabic, and kept an open mind, the
conversation was deafening. All that was needed was a spark. The self-
immolating Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi provided it.

The antiwar Democratic intelligentsia, which includes the president,
has been wrong on just about everything in the Greater Middle East
since 2001. It’s impossible to read The Next Attack: The Failure of
the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right, by Daniel
Benjamin and Steven Simon, now senior administration officials and
two of the best minds the Democrats have on counterterrorism, and not
sigh. The 2005 book saw the Iraq war as our undoing. In a rush to
judgment, Benjamin and Simon completely missed the developing
conversation about representative government. They misapprehended the
radical Islamic threat.

The Iraq war didn’t unleash a tidal wave of Arab holy warriors
against the United States or Europe. Mesopotamia is one of the
foundational lands of Islam—for Shiites it’s ground zero—yet the
number of jihadists who went to fight the Americans in Iraq after
2003 was probably far less than the number who went to fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan, a land on the periphery of the Arab
imagination. The Soviet-Afghan war produced bin Laden, the CEO of
modern Islamic terrorism. More important, it created the legend that
proud, death-defying holy warriors could take down a superpower.
Contrary to the fears of the American left, the Iraq war produced no
great jihadist thinker. No myth of indomitable zeal. The best it
produced was Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a ferocious beast who gave even
bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, heartburn because
his methods did the impossible, creating widespread Sunni sympathy
for Iraq’s bombed and butchered Shiites. The Americans killed al
Zarqawi, and no fundamentalist of note has immortalized him.

Republicans ought to be embracing the struggles in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and all that came in their wake, not dreading them. President Obama
has consistently been behind the curve on the Arab Spring. He has
handled the rebellion in Syria abominably—though it should have been
the easiest strategic decision of his presidency. Syria’s long-
suffering Sunni population finally revolted against a ruthless,
terrorist-loving, Iran-supporting, heretical Shiite dictatorship—an
amazing feat. Without the Alawite Arabs ruling in Damascus, the
Islamic Republic of Iran has no reliable access to Hezbollah in
Lebanon, the only faithful Arab offspring of Iran’s revolution. Since
even the Obama administration perhaps now realizes that the only sure
solution to the Iranian nuclear problem is regime change in Tehran,
each step toward that goal is important. Iran’s losing Hezbollah to
the Great Arab Revolt would be a significant blow to the mullahs, let
alone a blessing to Lebanon’s internal politics. The president has
declared that Bashar al-Assad must go, but he has offered no real
support to the opposition. The CIA exists for a reason.

Yet most Republicans are silent on Syria, or reinforce the
president’s position by adding their concern to the administration’s
calculated leaks about al Qaeda’s presence in the Syrian opposition.
News flash to Republicans: Al Qaeda will always try to plant itself
in movements opposing the anciens régimes of the region. If it does
not do so, it’s finished among the Arabs. The rebellions against
tyranny are enormously popular throughout the Middle East. Al Qaeda
Central and its allied jihadist groups did not see the democratic
wave coming. Bin Laden and al Zawahiri viewed democracy as a dismal,
antireligious idea, but they weren’t blind to its seductive power
among the faithful. Al Qaeda is trying to play catch up where it can,
improvising as it goes along. The longer and bloodier the Syrian
rebellion, the greater the opportunity for al Qaeda and other radical
groups to gain ground.

To counter the president’s unfailingly self-indulgent take on the
Middle East, Republicans ought to be at the forefront of thoughtfully
critiquing Islamic militancy (admittedly a difficult task, given the
Islamophobes within the party). They should not allow Obama to define
the threat down to the latest victim of a CIA drone.

No one knows what Mitt Romney would have done a year ago if he’d
received the information about bin Laden’s possible presence in
Abbottabad. In such situations, what-ifs are unanswerable, even for
ex-presidents like Bill Clinton, who should know what it feels like
to have made wrong decisions repeatedly about al Qaeda and the
Taliban. President Obama deserves credit for breaking loose from the
mindset common in Washington fearful of possibly rupturing U.S.-
Pakistani relations.

But give establishmentarian opinion its due: The U.S.-Pakistan
relationship still means something. A war is going on in Pakistan
over national identity and what it means to be a Muslim in an
artificial country. Indian officials sometimes remark that they have
yet to see a single Indian Muslim outside of Kashmir join jihadist
ranks. Hindu India has something that Pakistan lacks: a rich history
and an optimistic future that native Muslims can peacefully claim for
themselves. We don’t want the wrong side to win in nuclear Pakistan,
with catastrophic consequences for the United States. Pakistan offers
a large pool of well-educated Muslim militants who could go global in
their hatreds. Al Qaeda itself should be viewed as a Pakistani-Arab
hybrid. The raid on Abbottabad has likely helped the internal debate
in Pakistan, which is another reason why President Obama was right to
strike.

Killing bin Laden was great; capturing and interrogating him would
have been bolder and a much better decision given the irreplaceable
intelligence-gathering opportunity. Declassifying and releasing all
of the captured bin Laden files is a poor second choice, but it’s one
Republicans and Democrats in Congress should insist on. The most
important counterterrorist questions, however, are much larger than
any one man. They are strategic.

The Greater Middle East is in transition. We don’t know where it’s
going. We need to pay close attention to the intellectual whirlpools
that are developing throughout the region as democratic, Islamic, and
other convulsive ideas collide. It’s way too soon to be as cocky as
this administration has become about the decline of al Qaeda and
lethal Islamic militancy. The president and his followers may try to
depict Obama as counterterrorist warrior par excellence. Republicans
would be wise to point out that Jimmy Carter is the commander in
chief who really did risk all to save American lives and honor
(Abbottabad pales in comparison with Desert One, which one of the
officers involved likened to the Alamo, except the Americans were
trying “to get in, not out”).

After doing so, Republicans, and especially Mitt Romney, might
consider whether they, too, want to lead from behind. The defense
budget needs to be saved. Everything starts with that. Then they
need to realize that the Middle East will not be ignored while we
pretend to transfer our concern and military muscle toward China.
Across the region, which is in profound flux, the United States
increasingly appears as a listless superpower. President Obama may
think that shows appropriate and overdue disengagement. We fear it
shows troubling and provocative weakness.